Russia looks abroad for weaponry

Russia plans to spend 19 trillion roubles ($644.8 billion) over the next decade to equip its armed forces with the latest weaponry, including what may be the first purchases of US military technology since World War II.

The Defence, Finance and Economy ministries were in the final stages of approving a plan to increase the 2011-20 arms budget by 46 per cent from the previous estimate of 13 trillion roubles, Russia’s Defence Minister, Anatoly Serdyukov, said yesterday after returning from talks with US Defence Secretary
Robert Gates
in Washington.

“This is the minimum we need to equip our armed forces with modern weaponry," Mr Serdyukov said.

“We could ask for a bigger number, but we need to understand that the budget cannot afford such spending, so 19 trillion is a serious amount of money that will provide considerable orders for our defence industry."

Mr Serdyukov is looking abroad for arms that Russian companies cannot provide, breaking with predecessors who sought to keep the country autonomous in weapons procurement. He has been lobbying for a bigger budget since at least May, when President
Dmitry Medvedev
said the military should triple the ratio of “state of the art" equipment in its arsenal to 30 per cent by 2015.

The Defence Ministry’s proposal would push that figure to 70 per cent by 2020, Mr Serdyukov said.

To achieve the targets, Russia wanted to acquire technology from its former Cold War adversaries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, including the US, Mr Serdyukov said.

The Defence Ministry would seek bids for helicopter carrier ships by the end of this month and expected companies from France, Spain and the Netherlands to compete against domestic defence contractors, Mr Serdyukov said.

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“We are interested in many things, most importantly in communications, in everything that has to do with information technology," he said. “We would also be interested in some high-precision weapons."

The Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies forecast in June that Russia, the largest arms exporter after the US, would spend as much as $US12 billion ($12.6 billion) to buy defence technologies from European and Israeli companies over the next five years.

That estimate might be increased if Mr Serdyukov got more money, the director of the Moscow-based research firm and an adviser to Russia’s Defence Ministry, Ruslan Pukhov, said.